When the final electrical inspection test is made, it is often very difficult and sometimes even impossible to detect aluminum electrolytic capacitors that have been installed with reversed polarity. This can lead to field losses of electrolytic capacitors due to polarity reversal. To prevent this, optical and mechanical polarity indicators have already been used on electrolytic capacitors, in order to recognize polarity on the basis of the different terminal leads or merely to allow correct insertion into a printed circuit board. For this purpose, in known methods heretofore, one uses different terminal leads that are distinguished by differences in crimping, bending, thickness, color, or the like. However, these optical and mechanical polarity indicators require additional manufacturing steps on the electrolytic capacitor, which not only can adversely affect the reliability of operation, but can also result in increased costs. While optical polarity indicators are often unreliable, and can often hardly be detected after being soldered into a printed-circuit board, the mechanical polarity indicators still require costly additional measures on the printed-circuit boards, such as differently sized bore holes or differently shaped openings, which are complicated and expensive to introduce.